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Cube Holistic Wisdom - Rooster Drafting

Usman Jamil

10/31/11

In this article, I'll be taking a break from my insomnia-curing “how to build a cube” theoretical articles to talk about a mostly-unknown way to draft a cube known as “rooster drafting”. I'll also give you a breakdown of the format.

In a recent The Third Power episode, we talked about alternate ways to draft a cube and one of the topics that I covered was “rooster drafting”. Rooster Drafting was a Limited format created by former Limited Resources co-host, Denny's aficionado, and present Wizards of the Coast game designer Ryan Spain. It was covered in the Limited Resources episode #84 (“Community Cup, Ho!”) at about the 36 minute mark, but I'll discuss it in this article in more detail.

How DO you Rooster Draft?

Rooster drafting is a hybrid between several formats such as Sealed, Winchester, Winston, Rotisserie and Rochester (“Rooster” being a mix of booster + rotisserie.) I've heard it described as “drafting the packs for your sealed pool” and that's a pretty good description of the format. In further detail, this is Rooster drafting:

Both players take an equal number of evenly-sized packs from a cube. For example, both players make 6 packs with 15 cards in them.

Once the packs are made, reveal the contents of all of them.

Decide who has first pick.

The first player (player A) looks at all available packs and takes 1 pack.

The next player (player B) looks at the available packs and takes 2 packs.

Player A takes 2 packs, player B takes 2 packs, repeat until the last pack remains, which is taken.

Make decks.

When I've Rooster drafted with my cube, I've used six packs of fifteen cards for each person in the draft (with 2 people) because that's what I generally use for cube sealed. Ryan and Marshall talked about how they mainly used Rooster drafting as a two-person format but people on the MTGSalvation cube forum who discussed doing a forum rooster draft introduced a very interesting idea. Due to cube packs not having a set size like regular Magic packs, you can change the number of cards in them as well as the number of cards in the pool as you wish, so long as each player has an even number of packs in the pool. I recommend staying close to 90 cards for each player, as when I've Roostered with about 60 cards per player, your deck building options became extremely limited. Changing the number of cards in the pack can help you to tune the environment, as the smaller the packs get, the more control someone has over their deck's contents and it starts to get closer to something like a cube Rotisserie draft (although you won't ever have anywhere near that amount of control.)

If you're doing a Rooster draft with more than two players, the picking gets a little different, and if you've ever done a cube Rotisserie draft like fellow SCG writer Justin Parnell hosts and playsin, it's similar to that where the players at each end of the line get two picks except for the first pick in the draft. If you're new to Rotisserie drafting, check out this article on the mothership for a more visual explanation : just replace Lorwyn cards with cube packs.

Why Rooster?

I'm a fan of cube sealed but I've encountered people who haven't liked it as much because of having a lack of control over a cube sealed deck's contents, especially when using a small amount of cards like four packs of fifteen cards. While I don't find this to be the case in cube sealed, Rooster drafting mixes the sealed experience with being able to customize your deck like you can in a booster draft. In the Rooster Walkthough, you'll see a Stoneforge Mystic taken early in the draft and the player being rewarded by taking a few Swords for his deck later in the draft, like someone can easily do in a Booster draft. In a cube sealed, there are no such opportunities for customization . If you open a pool with Stoneforge Mystic and no equipment, well, them's the breaks. Rooster drafts are a nice middle ground where you cede some control to the packs that are opened, but you still retain a lot of that control, especially if you have your packs lean towards the smaller side.

Much like Winchester, Rochester and Rotisserie drafting, the open information in the draft can spur some very interesting conversations and can make for an enriching cube experience. I recently did a Winchester cube draft with Adam Styborski's pauper cube and one of my favorite parts was the open dialogue about how the packs were shaping up and what directions we could take our decks. You can also take advantage of the open information to Jedi mind trick your opponent, if you're into that sort of thing.

Rooster drafts tend to take less time than full-fledged booster drafts, although it's not as fast as doing a cube sealed deck, as there's a similar time lag that comes from opening a cube sealed pool and fully digesting the information and realizing what the directions that you can take your pool and deck. Ryan and Marshall talked about how they would Rooster draft when playing poker and I can easily see how that could happen, as Rooster drafts can be done quickly.

Rooster drafts can also reduce the disparity between picks. It can be frustrating as a cube designer to see packs with an obvious first pick, like a Mirrodin/Scars Sword or Jace, the Mind Sculptor (well, in the draft, it's probably anything but frustrating!). Due to the first player taking a pack and the second player (if you're doing a two-player Rooster draft) getting two packs, the disparity between the first and second player isn't very big (if at all) even if the 1st player gets to take an opening pack with a windmill slammingly insane card.

Rooster Draft Walkthrough

I recently did a Rooster draft with my friend Justin, manager of Ogre's Games in St. Louis (as they have a copy of my cube in the store) who, like everybody else (including 99.9% of the people reading this article) hadn't heard of Rooster drafting. After explaining the format, we made twelve packs of fifteen cards. Justin won the die roll and got first pick. The packs were as follows:

Part of the fun of cube drafting is hearing everyone say how amazing their packs are (“I have a Dark Confidant, a Stoneforge Mystic, AND an Umezawa's Jitte in here! What do I take ? this is insane!”) and we had a similar experience when we were “cracking the packs,” particularly the one with Dark Confidant, Mind Twist, and Animate Dead.

I then took the packs with Sol Ring and the pack with Mox Sapphire. Just as Justin threw down the gauntlet on drafting black, I was looking to draft red-based aggro, looking at the pool. I still wasn't sure on whether I wanted to draft red/green or red/black, but those first two packs kept those paths open . However, as I expected Justin to go into black, I was thinking that R/G beats would be my plan with something like Molten-Tail Masticore to top my curve.

Justin then took the pack with Umezawa's Jitte and the pack with a thousand planeswalkers (including Karn, Liberated) to solidify himself into Orzhov midrange with a lot of mid-to-late game value cards like the planeswalkers, Maze of Ith, fliers galore and a Sword of Light and Shadow.

Justin took the Wooded Foothills pack to solidify his midrange white deck (Baneslayer AND Moat, such daggers for my burn deck!) and the pack with Lightning Greaves, which had some more solid white cards and… a Mox Jet? Going 9th pack? Wow!

I took the pack with Siege-Gang Commander, as it provided a solid curve-topper to my deck and the pack with Mind Stone. It took me some time to decide between giving Justin the Zo-Zu pack and the Mind Stone pack and, again, in retrospect, I should have taken the Zo-Zu pack as it had Fireblast and Wheel of Fortune, two cards that are all-stars in any red aggro deck. As Justin took the last pack, we were ready to build decks. I initially built a red-green (splashing blue deck) but it was inferior to a red-black (splashing blue) build that I made, as I did not too well with the R/G version since I never really drew into the burn that I needed . But I won in game 3 with the R/B deck as my “attack with cheap guys in the early game, burn him out after he stabilizes” plan came together and worked out. The decks were as follows:

I'd have probably have tried to play Rout, Desolation Angel and Karn, Liberated in Justin's deck (over one of the Swords, Reveillark and Chandra) and I should have played some more cheap burn in my deck like Firebolt and Arc Trail, but overall, the decks turned out really well . I was pleased with how the Rooster draft experience went, as was Justin. I've been recently testing Skittering Skirge in my cube and he really impressed me in this draft; there was an awkward moment when I had to have him die to my casting Manic Vandal so that I could kill a Lightning Greaves on a Stillmoon Cavalier, but every other time he attacked in the air repeatedly for 3 and Justin had to assume that I could play around its drawback and kill it ASAP, a la Abyssal Persecutor.

I hope that this article has given you some insight on a new, fun, and flexible way to draft your cube. If you have trouble getting the four people needed to draft your cube and you've had your fill of Sealed, Winston, and Winchester, then Rooster is another way to enjoy the best draft environment ever created. Also, let me know in the comments which pack you'd take first if you were in this Rooster draft and if you like these non-“how to build a cube” style of articles.

About Usman Jamil

Usman Jamil has been playing Magic since Revised and Fallen Empires. Usman spends most of his Magic time thinking about, writing about, podcasting about, tinkering with and playing Cube, theorizing about its various aspects and going on his soapbox.